I’m attempting my first animation in blender, and I’m quite perplexed by the Soft Body simulation. In fact, I actually paid a blender artist (worth it) to spend an hour with me over google chat to help me with other aspects of this project, but they had said that the “physics simulations in blender are quite bad” and encouraged me to use shape keys for my model instead of physics.
Regardless, I’d like to see if anyone out there could help me achieve this goal of doing a proper animation.
I’ve gone through a number of tutorials, this one being the most helpful:
but I’m still not sure why my model will
In my case, I’d love it if the leaves were gently blowing in the wind, and reacting to the characters movement. Every time I try and apply the soft body simulation to the leaves (via a vertex group) the model dances all over the place, the head disappears, and generally things fall apart.
Unfortunately, this is true. There will be (hopefully!) some bigger changes in this year, but currently - it is quite a trial-and-error process to get to a realistic result.
BTW: very cool flower model!
I am not really an expert in this field, but some time ago i tried something quite similiar: i found out that using the mesh deform modifier on my mesh and applying the physics only to the deform target objects, it works quite decent.
But I am not sure if this technique works well on more complex models with an armature…
Anyway: here is a basic example file of how it might work: Mesh_deform.blend (1.41 MB). If you don’t know, what I did there, reply
Little hint: try this first on a very basic mesh to understand how it works - otherwise it is likely that everything will explode…
I would use jiggle bones, you could probably get more realistic movements.
I also don’t agree with the physics system being bad. Usually when someone says this, it’s because the don’t know how to use the particular system or tool.
I hope you didn’t think I was talking about you. I wasn’t. I was talking about the person who said this to the OP. This statement I agree with. Though its not newbie friendly, I think its discouraging to tell someone “bah, stay away from that, its no good”.
I’m really not an animator, but using jiggle bones sounds better than my approach - try this first.
Yea I tried it, and it worked even better than I thought. I also put a turbulence force on it to simulate the wind. Jiggle bones is definitely the way to go.
